Gov. Maura Healey is taking purpose at gun violence as a “public health” situation.
Healey stated she plans to work with Attorney General Andrea Campbell, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and others to “fund and support programming to reduce violence, particularly among our young people.”
“It is absolutely the lens through which we need to address this, and that means more intervention for health and wellness, for mental health, for efforts to deal with trauma, because we know trauma begets trauma, violence begets violence. And while numbers are going down … that’s no comfort to the mothers and fathers of 12-, 13-, 14-, 15-year-old kids in Boston and around who are shooting one another,” Healey stated on “Java with Jimmy” on Thursday morning.
As lawyer normal, Healey enforced the state’s gun legal guidelines. She drew the ire of Second Amendment advocates and gun house owners in 2016 when she heightened her workplace’s enforcement of an assault weapons ban that had been on the books for years by cracking down on copycat assault weapons.
Last summer season, she joined with the Baker administration to offer steering to licensing authorities and regulation enforcement companies on how a U.S. Supreme Court opinion hanging down New York’s concealed-carry gun licensing regulation applies to an identical Massachusetts regulation.
Healey stated she is going to proceed to implement what she known as “some of the strongest gun laws in place.”
“But it’s not good enough when we still have, every day or every other day, a report of a shooting — two people sitting in their car the other day, right? I mean, this cannot continue. I do think at the heart of so much of this, Jimmy, is a failure to address some of the root causes of violence,” Healey stated.
“And I’ve talked a long time about my real heavy focus on mental health, and I do think we need more mental health providers, we need more people trained in trauma-informed care and we’ve just got to do this for our young people and for our families,” she added. “My heart goes out to the victims, to the victim of violence, in Boston and beyond in the state.”
Source: www.bostonherald.com”